“Unspeakable thoughts, unspoken.” This is the prefatory phrase with which a character in Toni Morrison’s singularly influential novel Beloved characterizes the lyrical climax to come. What follows are four remarkable chapters in which we become privy, through Morrison’s words, to the unspeakable thoughts of three women: Sethe, a woman who escaped from slavery and murdered her daughter to prevent her being returned to a life as property; her surviving daughter, Denver; and the murdered girl, who has returned in the form of the titular character. Although the first three of these chapters are specific to a single character, their three...

In an unusually lyrical moment in Vladimir Nabakov’s Pale Fire, Charles Kinbote offers a paean to the near magical powers of the written word. Having just been handed, albeit temporarily, the manuscript of the poem by John Shade, Kinbote rhapsodizes:

We are absurdly accustomed to this miracle of a few written signs being able to contain immortal imagery, involutions of thought, new worlds with live people, speaking, weeping, laughing. We take it for granted so simply that in a sense, by the very act of brutish routine acceptance, we undo the work of ages …. What if we awake one...

A few months after the release of The Crying of Lot 49 and less than a year after the riots in Watts, Thomas Pynchon published an article in the New York Times Sunday Magazine entitled “A Journey Into the Mind of Watts,” in which he posits the copresence in L.A. of “two different cultures: one white and one black.”¹ The white culture, as Pynchon describes it, “belongs to the mass media. What is known around the nation as the L.A. scene exists chiefly as images on a screen or a TV tube, as four color magazine photos, as old radio...

No terms are more central or contested in Norman Mailer’s inspired work of new journalism, The Armies of the Night, than “real” and its apparent opposite, “symbolic.” Indeed, the term “real” shows up in the online bookseller Amazon’s concordance of the one hundred most frequently used words in the book, at a rate comparable to the words between, say, and look.¹ Initially the sheer repetition of the word seems like a mere verbal tic, for it often appears in a colloquial sense as either a loose synonym for genuine or as an intensifying adverb. But such uses, frequent as they...

Much has been said about the cultural transformations that separate the sixties from the seventies. My own account aims to show how one rather narrow development over the course of a decade—the emergence, and eventual institutionalization in the 1980 Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (dsm–III), of what came to be known as ptsd—informed the way writers understood and described the centrality of violence to American life as the Vietnam War came to a close. The turn to the very different domestic problems presented by Vietnam Vets and sexually violated women gave feminist novelists in this...

In a vignette by David Sedaris entitled “Possession,” first published in the New Yorker, the author tells of an apartment hunt that brings him to the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam.¹ The search only begins after David and his boyfriend, Hugh, discover that the wonderful place they currently rent will never be available for purchase because the landlord plans to pass it on to his two young daughters. Sedaris muses, in a gag that becomes poignant only in retrospect, “I kept hoping for a miracle. A riding accident, a playhouse fire: lots of things can happen to little girls” (100)....

The first of the above epigraphs comes from an interview given by Don DeLillo soon after the publication of Mao II.¹ The aptness of the image of “the hammers striking the page” for DeLillo’s body of work can hardly be overestimated. These aggressively hammering keys recall The Names, in which tools once used to chisel inscriptions into ancient stone are taken up by a murderous cult to shatter the skulls of their victims.² In these examples DeLillo gives words both the visual weight of sculpted matter and a weapon’s ability to shatter other material objects. The second epigraph, one of...

In the concluding pages of The Empire of Trauma, anthropologists Didier Fassin and Richard Rechtman clarify their position on “the moral economy” of trauma, an economy in which compassion, insurance payouts, local and international justice, and reparations are all circulated. Although they insist that they “have not sought to discover whether trauma is real, or whether psychological treatment of it is a good thing,” they do acknowledge that their work cannot and should not evade moral evaluation. Instead, they say:

[O]ur task is not to distinguish between good and evil, but to critique the actual conditions that produce social realities....